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the Christian democratic ideology can be characterized in terms of three core principles: a morally tinged conception of the “natural order” as a harmonious and organically integrated society; a remedial conception of the welfare state as a way to protect social unity and stability from the threat of radical takeover; and a conception of democratic practice as a constant process of compromise and reconciliation between conflicting social interests.

This approach is justified with reference to another classically Christian democratic idea: that everyone should contribute to the best of their ability to the well-being of society as a whole. While this involves some measure of socioeconomic redistribution, it steers clear of the more radical idea that society should aspire to some form of substantive—as well as formal—equality.

Biden has a similar view of the Democratic Party’s role in the contemporary United States. Given the way in which the Republican Party has been transformed under the leadership of Trump, Biden seems to think it’s now the role of the Democrats to reunite the whole nation under the banner of its traditional moral and political principles of inclusiveness and civility.

In contrast to Sanders’s advocacy for universalist welfare entitlement programs such as “Medicare for All” and free public college tuition, Biden thinks that the role of state intervention in the economy should be focused on the protection of socially disadvantaged groups

the deeply conservative dimension to Biden’s promise to “heal” the divisions that cut across American society—one that is reminiscent of European Christian democracy’s historic emphasis on the values of “national unity” and “restoration” of the social order in the aftermath of World War II

the logic of the Christian democratic parties in Europe that supported welfare-state policies in the aftermath of World War II as explicitly anti-revolutionary measures.

throughout the 1950s and ’60s, it was Christian democrats—not social democrats—who pushed forward many policies incentivizing homeownership for the working classes in both Germany and Italy

Biden’s approach to such law-and-order questions again parallels the thinking of Christian democratic parties in Europe. For instance, during the 1960s and ’70s, both Italian and German Christian democrats took a very firm stance against the so-called “Red Terrorism” of far-left revolutionary groups such as the Brigate Rosse and Baader-Meinhof—in some cases going as far as reviving extraordinary criminal justice procedures that hadn’t been used since the end of the fascist and national-socialist regimes. These measures were justified precisely as a compromise between the far-right’s demands for a complete suspension of the democratic order and the center-left’s calls for a more lenient approach.

Although Biden is a devout Catholic (one who has apparently been wearing a rosary under his sleeve since the death of his son Beau in 2015), he remains firmly within the American tradition of secularism, which posits a strict “wall of separation” between politics and religion. Europe’s Christian democracy, by contrast, is partly rooted in an attempt to directly translate principles of Catholic social doctrine into a democratic political platform. In this sense, Biden is a distinctly Americanized version of this European strand of political conservatism.

Christian democrats succeeded in keeping both the far-left and the far-right out of power for several decades after the end of World War II precisely on the basis of a coalition that united social elites, the urban middle classes, and the rural poor against the perceived threat of radical takeover

if he is indeed elected, Biden is likely to be far more open to political influence than either Clinton or Sanders would have been as president. His presidency would likely leave ample space for the two main factions within the Democratic Party—the Clintonian liberal wing and Sanders’s democratic socialist one—to continue shaping policy in important ways, even though neither is likely to get all of what they want. In this sense, the result wouldn’t be very much unlike the constant struggle for compromise between the center-right and the center-left wings of continental European Christian democratic parties during their period of political hegemony in the postwar years.

As the prospect of both fascist resurgence and communist revolution began to wane in postwar continental Europe, Christian democracy lost its way, falling prey to widespread clientelism and corruption. Ultimately, this is what brought down the Italian democrazia cristiana at the beginning of the 1990s and has also weakened the German Christian Democratic Union and other continental European Christian democratic parties’ political identities ever since. Seen in this light, Biden might succeed in defeating both Sanders and Trump. But his presidency would probably end up being rather weak and aimless, without doing much to address the United States’ deeper social and political problems.

there has been a long, slow disintegration of social norms and expectations. Today, new independent countries are hardly ever formed, but the UK has gone about creating the circumstances in which still future separation is possible.

Great social change has often happened in the past when a younger generation has been fully exposed to the folly of their parents and grandparents. 

Following Suez, young people voted differently to their parents in sufficient number to bring in governments in 1964 and 1966 that helped to slowly transform the UK, making it one of the most equitable countries in Europe.

The Conservative government – which could now hold power until at least December 2024 – will pretend it cares about the health service, about poor Britons, about the north of the kingdom, about young people’s futures, and it will pretend well. It is well practised.

As many countries begin partially reopening their economies, traffickers may now be in a position to become more powerful than ever. With economies in distress and many businesses facing ruin, cash-rich narcos may be able to cheaply buy their way into an even bigger share of the legitimate economy.

“There has always been a stock, it’s a very organized chain. It’s the way to control everything, especially the price. The stocks are on beaches such as Tarena [near the border with Panama], banana plantations, in the jungle. The stashes are everywhere,”

Traditionally, smugglers have used small, very fast speedboats, as well as fishing vessels and submarines, to ply their northern route. Lockdowns have made these methods harder to use, mainly for logistical reasons. So instead, smugglers are turning back to older, slower routes that are often broken up in parts.

Unlike exports to the United States, cocaine bound for Europe is typically moved in legal air and sea cargoes, especially fast-moving fresh goods such as flowers and fruit. The latter, as food, has continued to move unimpeded during the pandemic, helping feed Europe’s 9.1 billion euro-a-year cocaine habit. Colombia’s banana industry, for example, has been exempt from local lockdown measures, allowing cocaine to keep moving through the crop’s supply chain. “[Anyone] in the authorities or security that meddles with this route goes down,” said Rául, the Gulf Clan member, adding that people who are paid off to facilitate the smuggling of cocaine have an incentive to keep the drugs flowing. “Everybody eats,” he said.

Mexican cartels have used the crisis as a public relations opportunity. People associated with the cartels, including the daughter of imprisoned Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, have publicly distributed food and other essential items to the poor. Meanwhile, the country’s drug violence continues unabated, claiming an average of 80 lives per day.

Italy has fallen silent as a point of arrival, despite being home to mafia groups that dominate Europe’s cocaine trade. Seizures dropped by 80 percent over the months of March and April compared to the same period last year

Ramón Santolaria, the head of anti-narcotics at Spain’s national police in Catalonia, said cocaine traffickers may have mistakenly assumed that the pandemic would have reduced monitoring at ports. The cartels “have to continue exporting,” Santolaria said. “They are like a company. They can’t store everything in their countries, since it would be very risky.”

In March and April, Spain seized over 14 tons of cocaine in inbound shipments — a figure six times higher than the same period the previous year, said Manuel Montesinos, the deputy director of Customs surveillance at the Spanish Taxation Agency. “We are very struck by the frenetic pace,” Montesinos said. “Almost every day we receive alerts of detections of suspicious operations.”

“Italy did not receive much via ports or airports and that is because during lockdown we have been controlling them a lot,” said Marco Sorrentino, the head of anti-mafia department of Italy’s financial police, the Guardia di Finanza. Italian crime groups have shifted their operations to Spain, where they have large “colonies” according to Sorrentino. “Italian mafias and their partners thus sent cocaine mainly to Algeciras or Barcelona, and then from there they moved it on wheels to the rest of Europe and to Italy,” he said. “As cover-up they used trucks filled with fresh fruits or also soy flour,” which resembles cocaine.

At the street level, lockdowns have played havoc with cocaine sales — but have also failed to stop the trade. But in some cases at least, dealers’ adaptations may have actually put them in a more profitable position than before, as cocaine users are desperate and confined at home. “Even though they don’t lack product, they have raised prices a bit and are cutting it more,”

The solution? Delivering it to customers in the guise of food orders, or couriered by essential workers carrying documents that give them permission to move around freely. Dealers have also staked out positions in socially distanced queues outside supermarkets — one of the only permitted places to gather in public under Italy’s strict lockdown rules, which began easing up in early May.

The main dark web marketplaces have seen an increase in sales of roughly 30 percent since lockdown measures started coming into effect worldwide

“Private citizens who are in need and won’t have access to a bank loan will be victims of loan sharks,” he said. “But what worries us the most is that licit companies might be in need, and be approached by mafia organizations that will propose to become minority shareholders.” “And once this happens, they actually take over the whole company,”

approved a new constitution in 2011, helping it to gain control of the Constitutional Court and introduced political reforms that have cemented its grip on power. However, these have been carried out in a more orderly manner than in Poland, as they have not contravened the constitution. It was partly for this reason that the Polish government initially faced stronger opposition both domestically and from within the European Union.

The narrow majority for Brexit, gained at the 2016 referendum, provided the conservative and authoritarian right with a supposed mandate to expand its influence in British politics, through representing the democratic ‘will of the people’.

The uniqueness of Britain as a Constitutional Monarchy, with no written constitution, an unelected upper house and a more independent judiciary and civil service also create different challenges for the Conservative Party government. Its attempts to undemocratically force through a no-deal Brexit is meeting robust resistance from the courts and parliament.

This growth in immigration, in turn, is changing the image of Japan from ethnically homogenous to moderately diverse. Among Tokyo residents in their 20s, 1 in 10 is now foreign-born. And Tokyo is no longer an outlier. Much of the migration is happening in small industrial towns around the country, such as Shimukappu in central Hokkaido and Oizumi in Gunma prefecture, where migrant populations make up more than 15 percent of the local population. In the mostly rural Mie prefecture, east of Osaka and Kyoto, foreign migration has reversed years of population loss.

Conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has based his support for the changing immigration policy not on any humanitarian concerns but rather on pragmatic, demographic arguments. By 2050, the world population is expected to increase by 2 billion people, according to the United Nations, but Japan’s population is expected to shrink by at least 20 million. Meanwhile, the fertility rate in Japan has fallen to 1.4 children per woman, while 28 percent of the country is over 65 years old. This means that the country’s population has been dropping by around 400,000 people a year

With unemployment consistently below 3 percent in recent years, even after the pandemic, employers are increasingly raising alarms about labor shortages. Last year, for the first time in Japan’s history, there were more jobs available than the number of job seekers in all of Japan’s 47 prefectures. In a country long known for its restrictive borders, immigration is now seen as the most obvious solution to that demographic challenge.

Japan has developed a unique program of customized immigration, based on specific requests for workers from various countries

Japan custom-orders a labor force in the 14 sectors where they are most urgently needed, including nurses and care workers, shipbuilders, farm workers, car mechanics, and workers in the fishing and construction industries

he said he prefers the casual xenophobia of Japan to the structural racism of America

most of Japanese society supports the changing immigration policy. In a recent survey by Nikkei, almost 70 percent of Japanese said it is “good” to see more foreigners in the country. “The nationalist, anti-immigrant groups here only make up perhaps 1-2 percent of voters. It’s not like Europe. And they have not raised their voices about this so far,”

bilateral agreements Japan has drafted with countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, which will allow them to send tens of thousands of care workers to Japan annually. Both countries see this as a win-win proposition. Japan gets much-needed labor, the Philippines gets an increase in foreign remittances, and many workers will eventually return, having learned new valuable skills

opposition has largely come from Abe’s left, over concerns about a lack of regulation on employers, which they fear could lead to exploitation. Many foreign workers are already forced to work overtime, receive less pay, and risk having their passports and travel documents confiscated by employers

some factories in the mostly rural Gifu prefecture have implemented segregated bathrooms and locker rooms for domestic and foreign workers

This dynamic was common in the immigration debate in Europe and the United States in the 1980s and ’90s, when pro-business conservatives often pushed for more immigrants and guest workers, while labor unions raised concerns for workers’ rights and downward pressure on wages.

The widespread xenophobia in Japan is hardly a myth. In 2010, the U.N.’s human rights experts called out Japan for racism, discrimination, and exploitation of migrant workers. Increased immigration has not changed the country’s notoriously strict asylum policies. In 2018, only 42 asylum-seekers were approved, out of around 10,000 applicants.

given that latest bill allows an easier pathway for skilled foreign workers to apply for permanent residency and, eventually, Japanese citizenship—it may do more than simply sustain society. “More workers will try to stay here permanently,” Oguma said. “So even if the bill is not meant to change Japan, it certainly has the potential to change Japanese society in the long term.”

Sooner or later, Japan may face nationwide debate on what it means to be Japanese in the 21st century. Few countries undergoing demographic shifts are able to avoid these challenges.

When South Korea accepted 500 Yemeni refugees in 2018, it created storms of protests, with street rallies demanding that the Yemenis be sent back, calling them “fake refugees.”

In early June, thousands of people participated in Black Lives Matter protests in Tokyo, which has contributed to a nationwide debate on harassment of migrants and foreigners—as well as race.

“Xenophobic nationalists are generally irrelevant in politics. If there is a backlash, it will most likely begin as a local uprising against Tokyo, a populist revolt against the central government, just as in the EU,” Oguma said. “But I don’t see it happening right now. The far-right here is too atomized, each faction want different things. So I don’t really worry about an organized uprising.”

With massive stimulus spending and a robust, universal health care system, Japan has weathered the pandemic fairly well. Unemployment in April was 2.5 percent. While there has been some anecdotal evidence of increased racist harassment of foreign workers, coupled with an emerging skepticism toward globalization and migration, Japan at the moment is one of the few countries where resentment against immigrants is not the defining feature of politics.

In 1952, the Italian government commissioned a study of its past colonial activities from a group of 24 scholars, largely former colonial officials, including governors and geographers. The committee, known as “Comitato per la documentazione dell’Opera dell’Italia in Africa,” (Committee for the Documentation of the Italian Activities in Africa) continued its work until 1984, producing 40 volumes, most of them hagiographies.

Fascist troops conquered Ethiopia in 1936, with the help of chemical weapons, and took Albania in 1939

“Having colonies was seen as a way of being modern,”

It’s estimated that during the 60 years of Italian colonialism, almost 1 million people died due to war, deportations, and internment

widespread summary executions, torture, and mass incarceration. To crush the Libyan resistance, in 1930 the Italian general Rodolfo Graziani, nicknamed “the butcher of Fezzan,” put the civilian population in concentration camps. In Ethiopia, the Fascists deployed chemical attacks. When Ethiopian rebels tried to kill him, in 1937, Graziani had 19,000 Ethiopian civilians executed in retaliation.

After the end of World War II, Italy’s new ruling class, largely composed of anti-Fascists, created two intertwined myths: the myth of the “good Italian colonialist” and the myth of the “good Italian soldier.”

The aim was to create a sense of cohesion between the new anti-Fascist government and the general population, by reassuring the latter they don’t share the blame of the dictatorship’s deeds

The myth of the good colonialist was devised as a propaganda tool to make the point that Italy should keep its colonies that were conquered before Fascism, which didn’t work out.

When Ethiopia requested the extradition of Graziani in 1949, Italy refused, despite the fact that he was included in a list of war criminals of the United Nations for the use of toxic gases and the bombing of some Red Cross hospitals.

In 1882, the Kingdom of Italy, which was founded only two decades earlier, invaded Eritrea, and seven years later, it conquered Somalia. Between 1895 and 1896 Italy also tried to conquer Ethiopia, but it failed spectacularly, with the Ethiopian troops inflicting on the Italian attackers the worst defeat ever suffered by a European nation in Africa. In 1911, the Italians took Libya.

Unlike other European countries, Italy never had prominent voices confronting its colonial crimes

“The French public might not have agreed with the position of Sartre or Fanon, but they knew who they were,”

colonial brutality is the subject of a classic of Italian cinema: Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and a nomination at the Academy Awards, chronicled the brutal French repression of Algeria. It posed no problem, because the bad guys were the French.

the Italian governement intervened in 1982 to prevent the distribution of a movie that would have put Italy’s colonialism in bad light: Lion of the Desert, chronicling Italy’s repression of the Libyan resistance led by Omar al-Mukhtar, was not aired until 2009, during a state visit by Muammar al-Qaddafi

As recently as 1997, Italy formally protested against the United Kingdom because the BBC aired a documentary, called Fascist Legacy, about Italian war crimes. The Italian state TV channel RAI bought a copy of the movie but never aired it.

in 2012, a mausoleum honoring Graziani, the war criminal, was erected near Rome. A court ordered it to be taken down, because it violated a law against “Fascist propaganda” (Graziani also headed the pro-Nazi army of the Salò Republic), but the order was never carried out. While it has been defaced and mocked with graffiti, the mausoleum still stands.

Italy decolonization was “a passive process, not an active one.” Italy did not go through a lengthy independence war, as France did in Algeria, nor did it witness a large-scale civil rights movement, as Britain did in India: Italy simply lost its colonies because it lost the war

there were “two types of removal: one from the authority but also one from the Italian people.” She points out that many Italian families have recent ancestors who fought in colonial wars in Africa. “If people were to check in their attics, they will likely find memorabilia of that period,” but they ignore it

a small but growing number of Italian authors who are tackling Italy’s colonial violence head on

Italian authorities should build monuments to the victims and start teaching about colonial violence in schools: “Many high school books still claim that Italy went to Africa to bring civilization.”

Despite the fact that Italy is fast becoming a multiethnic society, and despite the fact that its colonies came to an end almost 80 years ago, the country doesn’t seem ready to face its own past.

In every country surveyed, those on the right are more likely than those on the left to prioritize sticking to traditions, to say people today are too easily offended by what others say, and to say the bigger societal problem is seeing discrimination where it does not exist.

while those on the left and right are equally likely to say they are proud most of the time in both France and Germany, in the U.S. and UK, those on the right are more than three times as likely to say they are proud most of the time than those on the left

issues of pride for some were often sources of shame for others. In the UK, one such issue was the concept of empire. Those on the ideological right praised the historic empire for its role in spreading English and Western culture overseas, while those on the ideological left discussed how the UK had disrupted local cultures and often left chaos in its wake in its former colonies.

whereas groups composed of Republicans discussed American history through the lens of opportunity, groups composed of Democrats stressed the inadequacy of how American history is taught – and how it often glosses over racism and inequitable treatment of minority groups. Republican participants, for their part, even brought up how political correctness itself makes them embarrassed to be American – while Democratic participants cited increased diversity as a point of pride

While Britons are as ideologically divided as Americans on issues of pride, when it comes to every other cultural issue asked about in this report, Americans stand out for being more ideologically divided than those in the Western European countries surveyed.

Younger people – those under 30 – are less likely to place requirements on Christianity, language, birth or adopting the country’s traditions to be part of their country than older age groups. They are also more likely to say their country will be better off if it is open to changes. The notable exception to this pattern is Germany, where opinion differs little by age.

In the eight centuries of Murano glassmaking, the use of natural gas is relatively new, adopted only in the 1950s.

But environmental regulations adopted in the interim prevent going back to wood. Local emissions would far exceed the legal threshold, explained Francesco Gonella, a physicist who specializes in artistic glass. “You may have a wood-powered stove up on a mountain, but you can’t have hundreds of wood-powered furnaces going at 1100 degrees Celsius,”

The glassmaking industry is responsible for only a tiny fraction of Italy’s emissions. But the work is energy-intensive. In a normal year, the Murano factories guzzle more than 13 million cubic meters of natural gas, according to a market insider speaking on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized by his company to talk. That’s as much as a town of 30,000 people would typically use in domestic heating. Yet Murano is an island of 5,000.

The range and depth of those colors, along with the level of artistry, help authentic Murano glass stand out from mass-produced versions from China.

“Murano’s is an unlucky sector,” said Gonella, the physicist. “It finds itself dealing with problems of different natures: commercial, because China rolls out counterfeit glass; environmental; and now the blow delivered by bills that are unsustainable for many.”

Electric furnaces can’t provide the kind of heat or artistic control they need. The sector has been looking into hydrogen as an alternative fuel. But that would require building a whole new network of pipes, designed to withstand corrosion from the hydrogen running through them.

“we’ll need a massive investment in local renewable technologies that won’t require the massive costs of importing power from the outside. Geothermic, absolutely, all around the island, and on it. Wind farms, off the lagoon, catching wind at dawn and dusk. And solar. All of these factories also need to be covered in solar panels.”

Mattia Rossi, 43, shuttered his family business this month because of financial problems made worse by skyrocketing bills.“If I’m shelling out 5,000 euros for the electric bill one month and 15 [thousand] the next, I won’t be able to raise the price by 30 to 40 percent. My goblet would no longer cost 80, but 150 euros. People just won’t buy it then. Because glass is a beautiful thing, but it’s not bread and milk. It’s unnecessary.”

Meloni now faces a dilemma. She could double down on the nationalistic, far-right ethos of her party, galvanizing her loyal base, or she could broaden her political horizon, slowly turning Brothers of Italy into a big-tent party hosting conservatives of different persuasions.

She even wrote an open-hearted memoir titled I Am Giorgia, designed to reach out to people beyond her base by sharing her personal story. The book sold more than 100,000 copies, a remarkable figure for a book written by a politician

an unmet demand for a center-right coalition that could host both moderates and proponents of what Brothers of Italy’s most traditional supporters refer to as destra sociale, or “social right.”

“I don’t see what elements may support the definition of Brothers of Italy as a far-right party,” Meloni told Foreign Policy, “we are a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party, which I am currently president of, which is the family of the European and Western conservatives, joined by more than 40 parties in several countries, spanning from the Likud in Israel to the Tories in the U.K. and the GOP in the U.S.”

“Unfortunately, the mainstream culture is oversimplifying, depicting anyone who talks about fatherland, family, sanctity of life, Christian and classical civilization as a dangerous extremist in order to deny his or her free speech rights. We’ve seen this in the U.S., with the demonization of Trump, who’s been canceled on social media, and we are increasingly seeing the same attitude toward conservative movements in Europe,” Meloni told Foreign Policy.

“We strongly believe in the project of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party,” said Carlo Fidanza, a member of the European Parliament who’s in charge of Brothers of Italy’s foreign affairs portfolio. “Our goal is to enlarge the house of the European conservatives, not to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.” When Fidanza says enlargement, what he really means is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban

Brothers of Italy has been careful to distance itself from neofascist organizations and extremist groups, but sometimes the two dimensions touch each other. Last January, for instance, Meloni observed, as she does every year, the anniversary of the killings of three members of the Italian Social Movement in Rome in 1978, an event that was also commemorated by hundreds of militants making the fascist salute in the area where the massacre took place. The rally was not organized nor supported by Brothers of Italy, but the neofascist activists and the party share a common heritage that may blur the line between the suit-and-tie heirs of the social right and outright fascist apologists

In 2019, some local leaders of Brothers of Italy in the Marche region organized a dinner party to celebrate the anniversary of Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, and the symbol of the party appeared next to the portrait of Italy’s dictator and other fascist memorabilia. The party formally disavowed the event

Dog whistles are also common in Brothers of Italy’s communication style. The party promoted a campaign against the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who had allegedly funded a center-left party in Italy. The claim was, “Keep the money of the usurers,” a reference to one of the most indelible antisemitic tropes. The term “usurer” is still used in the party’s rhetoric to describe international bankers, Eurocrats, and foreign powers of all sorts attempting to erode Italy’s sovereignty

“The problem is that Italy never went through a serious process of elaboration of its fascist past. Many Italians still believe fascism wasn’t altogether evil and the country never really developed a culture of rights and political pluralism,”

Unlike Germany, which got into a process known as “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” or “overcoming the past,” involving culture, education, and public debates grappling with the idea of collective culpability during the Nazi regime, Italy never had such a debate

“We’ve been presented as the new face of the old post-fascist forces, but when we founded the party in 2012 the whole idea was to break with the past and build a new, post-ideological force predicated on the defense of the national interest. It’s safe to say we’re now a Gaullist party more than a far-right one,”

At the European level, Meloni is confronted with a dilemma similar to the one she’s facing in Rome; she would need to decide whether to move to the center, sticking to the more moderate conservatives, or to join the broad far-right coalition that is tempting her traditional allies

Now that the Republican Party is embroiled in a fight between Trump loyalists and traditional party members, Meloni is keeping an eye on the situation, secretly hoping that what will come out when the dust settles is a “Trumpist GOP, without Trump,” as one Brothers of Italy official put it.

His plan clearly entails filling a void at the centre of the political spectrum, appealing to the many moderate voters who feel represented neither by Salvini's far right nor by the PD's social-democratic wing

Renzi's move is bad news for the stability of the unnatural majority currently at the helm of the country. Although none of its members have any reason to call it quits and demand a new poll in the short term, all of them, especially Italia Viva, have strong incentives to stress their differences.

Which brings us back to Salvini and his mid-summer “faux pas”. Given what lies ahead, finding yourself as little more than a spectator doesn't seem such a bad outcome after all. Indeed, some analysts believe the far-right leader's goal was never to take part in new elections right away, but rather to carve himself a comfortable spot on the sidelines for a few months, leaving to others the dirty business of governing for a little while. Salvini may have decided that it was in his best interest to switch to the opposition, trusting that any majority put together by President Mattarella to deal with the budget and other urgent matters wouldn't last long.

From Salvini's standpoint, though, the best-case scenario would have been a caretaker government made of technicians and designed only to lead the country through this delicate phase, with an expiry date shortly after the upcoming winter. Instead, the country's new government is fully “political”: the result of a fairly wide-ranging programme agreement between 5 Star and the Dems, with prominent party members in the key posts.It is quite possible that Salvini underestimated the chances of this outcome and that he did not adequately prepare for it, as suggested by his partial u-turn a few days after he announced his withdrawal from the majority: in an incoherent speech in the Senate on 20 August, first he accused the 5 Star of hindering Italy's economic development, then he offered to put the government back on track for a little longer.

If the shaky new alliance holds for more than a few months, if 5 Star, the Democratic Party and Renzi's new political creature succeed in convincing the country that they have a vision that goes beyond clinging to the top jobs for the sake of it, Salvini's credibility as government material may take a serious hit.

being in government at this particular time brings with it great danger. If the coalition falls apart quickly after achieving little beyond spending cuts amid a bleak economic outlook, the centre-left and 5 Star risk being erased from the political scene in the next election.

Huge and complex problem such as climate change, the march of the machines, an aging population and endemic loneliness require complex answers that no single party or clique within one can hope to answer. Our politics is going to have to become so much bigger, more adapt and agile to meet these challenges. And thankfully, everywhere in the gaps and cracks between the state and the free market, people and organisations are practicing the participative and negotiated spirit of the age. And the networked citizen is replacing the industrial worker as the agent of change.

Portugal shows that both pluralism and proportional representation don’t have to hold socialists back

governments still harass, expel, and attempt to exterminate minority groups in the name of the nation-state ideal, and sovereignty still gives them carte blanche to do so

insistence on the nation-state as the only legitimate and legal actor on the world stage leaves substate groups vulnerable to exploitation, attack, and shady dealing

the issue isn’t limited to the Kurds. In the news this week are Rohingya refugees stuck between two countries that don’t want them, Uighurs forced into detention camps, and Catalan protests for independence. History offers even more parallels, from the United States repeatedly breaking treaties with Native Americans to World War II, in which the United States was willing to go to war to protect the territorial integrity of France along with the people in it but was not willing to accept refugees fleeing the Holocaust. The nation-state system is designed to protect itself and its members, rather than people

nonstate groups are at a particular disadvantage. Though they may hold de facto territory, they don’t hold it legally; they have no international rights to a military or to self-defense. They have no seat in international or supranational organizations, leaving them outside global decision-making and with no recourse in attempting to hold states accountable for their actions. Their leaders are not accorded head of state status, and they have no official diplomats. Since even the most generous autonomy statutes don’t confer the protections of statehood, separatist groups are often willing to risk high losses to win independence, fueling conflicts

Substate groups are not the only example that the system is failing. Nonstate actors from terrorist groups to multinational corporations have increasing impacts on global politics, and traditional geopolitical theory does not do a great job of dealing with them. Even for bilateral issues, the nation-state is not always the most useful unit of analysis.

States remain reluctant to break the collective agreement on the legitimacy of sovereignty. They are similarly reticent about adding more states to their exclusive club, in part because it might suggest to dissidents within their own area that renegotiation of borders is possible

it remains difficult to garner international recognition for a new state. That leaves mediators attempting to convince vulnerable groups to settle for something less, in the face of all evidence that a recognized state is their best chance for security and self-determination.

While interstate conflicts have fallen over the past 50 years, intrastate fighting has soared. These wars disrupt trade and world politics, weaken countries, and raise uncertainty in neighboring states. On the other hand, states have proved themselves adept at using substate actors to further their own interests within foreign countries while evading responsibility for it, from the United States arming the Contras in Nicaragua to Sudan and Chad supporting each other’s rebel movements.

Russian elites attempted to tip the scales of U.S. leadership in order to win more modern spoils: unfettered soft power in their region, access to trade, and, notably, the ability to infringe on other countries’ sovereignty without consequences.

the United States—and other nation-states—has little or no control over multinational corporations, with their complex legal structures and tenuous ties to geography

we need to recognize both the rights of substate groups and the legal responsibilities of extrastate entities and create mechanisms in the international system to include them in the halls of power

In Poland, the Czech Republic and Lithuania, majorities say the economic situation for most people is better today than it was under communism. In Hungary and Slovakia, more people say it is better, but substantial minorities still say it is worse. And in Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia, more than half believe the economic situation is worse today than it was under communism.

Young people in general are keener on the movement away from a state-controlled economy in many of the countries surveyed. For example, in Slovakia, 84% of 18- to 34-year-olds are in favor of this change, compared with 49% of those ages 60 and older. Double-digit age gaps also appear in Bulgaria, Ukraine, Russia and Lithuania.

Majorities in all the former Soviet orbit countries surveyed say politicians and business people have benefited a great deal or fair amount since the fall of communism. And in all cases, more people say political and business leaders have prospered than say changes have benefited ordinary people.

people tend to believe education, the standard of living and pride in their country has improved. But they see downsides as well, and there are sharp differences between countries on the overall benefits of these changes.

The only instances where significantly fewer now say these changes have had a good influence on society for any of these various aspects tested are in the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Slovakia on spiritual values and in Lithuania on national pride.

bloated, inefficient health-care system

Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable

decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net

same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories

the COVID‑19 debacle has also touched—and implicated—nearly every other facet of American society: its shortsighted leadership, its disregard for expertise, its racial inequities, its social-media culture, and its fealty to a dangerous strain of individualism.

SARS‑CoV‑2 is neither as lethal as some other coronaviruses, such as SARS and MERS, nor as contagious as measles. Deadlier pathogens almost certainly exist. Wild animals harbor an estimated 40,000 unknown viruses, a quarter of which could potentially jump into humans. How will the U.S. fare when “we can’t even deal with a starter pandemic?,”

The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal failed us

Many conservationists jump on epidemics as opportunities to ban the wildlife trade or the eating of “bush meat,” an exoticized term for “game,” but few diseases have emerged through either route. Carlson said the biggest factors behind spillovers are land-use change and climate change, both of which are hard to control. Our species has relentlessly expanded into previously wild spaces. Through intensive agriculture, habitat destruction, and rising temperatures, we have uprooted the planet’s animals, forcing them into new and narrower ranges that are on our own doorsteps. Humanity has squeezed the world’s wildlife in a crushing grip—and viruses have come bursting out.

This year, the world’s coronavirus experts—and there still aren’t many—had to postpone their triennial conference in the Netherlands because SARS‑CoV‑2 made flying too risky.

In 2003, China covered up the early spread of SARS, allowing the new disease to gain a foothold, and in 2020, history repeated itself. The Chinese government downplayed the possibility that SARS‑CoV‑2 was spreading among humans, and only confirmed as much on January 20, after millions had traveled around the country for the lunar new year. Doctors who tried to raise the alarm were censured and threatened. One, Li Wenliang, later died of COVID‑19. The World Health Organization initially parroted China’s line and did not declare a public-health emergency of international concern until January 30. By then, an estimated 10,000 people in 20 countries had been infected, and the virus was spreading fast.

Even after warnings reached the U.S., they fell on the wrong ears. Since before his election, Trump has cavalierly dismissed expertise and evidence. He filled his administration with inexperienced newcomers, while depicting career civil servants as part of a “deep state.” In 2018, he dismantled an office that had been assembled specifically to prepare for nascent pandemics. American intelligence agencies warned about the coronavirus threat in January, but Trump habitually disregards intelligence briefings. The secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, offered similar counsel, and was twice ignored.

“By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken.”

Travel bans make intuitive sense, because travel obviously enables the spread of a virus. But in practice, travel bans are woefully inefficient at restricting either travel or viruses. They prompt people to seek indirect routes via third-party countries, or to deliberately hide their symptoms. They are often porous: Trump’s included numerous exceptions, and allowed tens of thousands of people to enter from China. Ironically, they create travel: When Trump later announced a ban on flights from continental Europe, a surge of travelers packed America’s airports in a rush to beat the incoming restrictions. Travel bans may sometimes work for remote island nations, but in general they can only delay the spread of an epidemic—not stop it.

countries “rely on bans to the exclusion of the things they actually need to do—testing, tracing, building up the health system,”

genetic evidence shows that the specific viruses that triggered the first big outbreaks, in Washington State, didn’t land until mid-February. The country could have used that time to prepare. Instead, Trump, who had spent his entire presidency learning that he could say whatever he wanted without consequence, assured Americans that “the coronavirus is very much under control,” and “like a miracle, it will disappear.” With impunity, Trump lied. With impunity, the virus spread.

it found a nation through which it could spread easily, without being detected

sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise

In response to the global energy crisis of the 1970s, architects made structures more energy-efficient by sealing them off from outdoor air, reducing ventilation rates. Pollutants and pathogens built up indoors, “ushering in the era of ‘sick buildings,’ ” says Joseph Allen, who studies environmental health at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Energy efficiency is a pillar of modern climate policy, but there are ways to achieve it without sacrificing well-being. “We lost our way over the years and stopped designing buildings for people,”

As of early July, one in every 1,450 Black Americans had died from COVID‑19—a rate more than twice that of white Americans. That figure is both tragic and wholly expected given the mountain of medical disadvantages that Black people face

The indoor spaces in which Americans spend 87 percent of their time became staging grounds for super-spreading events. One study showed that the odds of catching the virus from an infected person are roughly 19 times higher indoors than in open air. Shielded from the elements and among crowds clustered in prolonged proximity, the coronavirus ran rampant in the conference rooms of a Boston hotel, the cabins of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and a church hall in Washington State where a choir practiced for just a few hours.

Between harsher punishments doled out in the War on Drugs and a tough-on-crime mindset that prizes retribution over rehabilitation, America’s incarcerated population has swelled sevenfold since the 1970s, to about 2.3 million. The U.S. imprisons five to 18 times more people per capita than other Western democracies. Many American prisons are packed beyond capacity, making social distancing impossible. Soap is often scarce. Inevitably, the coronavirus ran amok. By June, two American prisons each accounted for more cases than all of New Zealand. One, Marion Correctional Institution, in Ohio, had more than 2,000 cases among inmates despite having a capacity of 1,500.

America’s nursing homes and long-term-care facilities house less than 1 percent of its people, but as of mid-June, they accounted for 40 percent of its coronavirus deaths. More than 50,000 residents and staff have died. At least 250,000 more have been infected. These grim figures are a reflection not just of the greater harms that COVID‑19 inflicts upon elderly physiology, but also of the care the elderly receive. Before the pandemic, three in four nursing homes were understaffed, and four in five had recently been cited for failures in infection control. The Trump administration’s policies have exacerbated the problem by reducing the influx of immigrants, who make up a quarter of long-term caregivers.

the Department of Health and Human Services paused nursing-home inspections in March, passing the buck to the states. Some nursing homes avoided the virus because their owners immediately stopped visitations, or paid caregivers to live on-site. But in others, staff stopped working, scared about infecting their charges or becoming infected themselves. In some cases, residents had to be evacuated because no one showed up to care for them.

its problematic attitude toward health: “Get hospitals ready and wait for sick people to show,” as Sheila Davis, the CEO of the nonprofit Partners in Health, puts it. “Especially in the beginning, we catered our entire [COVID‑19] response to the 20 percent of people who required hospitalization, rather than preventing transmission in the community.” The latter is the job of the public-health system, which prevents sickness in populations instead of merely treating it in individuals. That system pairs uneasily with a national temperament that views health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good.

“As public health did its job, it became a target” of budget cuts,

Today, the U.S. spends just 2.5 percent of its gigantic health-care budget on public health. Underfunded health departments were already struggling to deal with opioid addiction, climbing obesity rates, contaminated water, and easily preventable diseases. Last year saw the most measles cases since 1992. In 2018, the U.S. had 115,000 cases of syphilis and 580,000 cases of gonorrhea—numbers not seen in almost three decades. It has 1.7 million cases of chlamydia, the highest number ever recorded.

In May, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan asserted that his state would soon have enough people to trace 10,000 contacts every day. Last year, as Ebola tore through the Democratic Republic of Congo—a country with a quarter of Maryland’s wealth and an active war zone—local health workers and the WHO traced twice as many people.

Compared with the average wealthy nation, America spends nearly twice as much of its national wealth on health care, about a quarter of which is wasted on inefficient care, unnecessary treatments, and administrative chicanery. The U.S. gets little bang for its exorbitant buck. It has the lowest life-expectancy rate of comparable countries, the highest rates of chronic disease, and the fewest doctors per person. This profit-driven system has scant incentive to invest in spare beds, stockpiled supplies, peacetime drills, and layered contingency plans—the essence of pandemic preparedness. America’s hospitals have been pruned and stretched by market forces to run close to full capacity, with little ability to adapt in a crisis.

Sabeti’s lab developed a diagnostic test in mid-January and sent it to colleagues in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. “We had working diagnostics in those countries well before we did in any U.S. states,”

American hospitals operate on a just-in-time economy. They acquire the goods they need in the moment through labyrinthine supply chains that wrap around the world in tangled lines, from countries with cheap labor to richer nations like the U.S. The lines are invisible until they snap. About half of the world’s face masks, for example, are made in China, some of them in Hubei province. When that region became the pandemic epicenter, the mask supply shriveled just as global demand spiked. The Trump administration turned to a larder of medical supplies called the Strategic National Stockpile, only to find that the 100 million respirators and masks that had been dispersed during the 2009 flu pandemic were never replaced. Just 13 million respirators were left.

The supply of nasopharyngeal swabs that are used in every diagnostic test also ran low, because one of the largest manufacturers is based in Lombardy, Italy—initially the COVID‑19 capital of Europe. About 40 percent of critical-care drugs, including antibiotics and painkillers, became scarce because they depend on manufacturing lines that begin in China and India. Once a vaccine is ready, there might not be enough vials to put it in, because of the long-running global shortage of medical-grade glass—literally, a bottle-neck bottleneck.

As usual, health care was a matter of capitalism and connections. In New York, rich hospitals bought their way out of their protective-equipment shortfall, while neighbors in poorer, more diverse parts of the city rationed their supplies.

A study showed that the U.S. could have averted 36,000 COVID‑19 deaths if leaders had enacted social-distancing measures just a week earlier. But better late than never: By collectively reducing the spread of the virus, America flattened the curve. Ventilators didn’t run out, as they had in parts of Italy. Hospitals had time to add extra beds.

the indiscriminate lockdown was necessary only because America’s leaders wasted months of prep time. Deploying this blunt policy instrument came at enormous cost. Unemployment rose to 14.7 percent, the highest level since record-keeping began, in 1948. More than 26 million people lost their jobs, a catastrophe in a country that—uniquely and absurdly—ties health care to employment

In the middle of the greatest health and economic crises in generations, millions of Americans have found themselves disconnected from medical care and impoverished. They join the millions who have always lived that way.

Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shouldered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence. In half of the states, people with dementia and intellectual disabilities faced policies that threatened to deny them access to lifesaving ventilators. Thousands of people endured months of COVID‑19 symptoms that resembled those of chronic postviral illnesses, only to be told that their devastating symptoms were in their head. Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a “great equalizer,” the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nation’s history.

Of the 3.1 million Americans who still cannot afford health insurance in states where Medicaid has not been expanded, more than half are people of color, and 30 percent are Black.* This is no accident. In the decades after the Civil War, the white leaders of former slave states deliberately withheld health care from Black Americans, apportioning medicine more according to the logic of Jim Crow than Hippocrates. They built hospitals away from Black communities, segregated Black patients into separate wings, and blocked Black students from medical school. In the 20th century, they helped construct America’s system of private, employer-based insurance, which has kept many Black people from receiving adequate medical treatment. They fought every attempt to improve Black people’s access to health care, from the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the ’60s to the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

A number of former slave states also have among the lowest investments in public health, the lowest quality of medical care, the highest proportions of Black citizens, and the greatest racial divides in health outcomes

“We’re designed for discrete disasters” like mass shootings, traffic pileups, and hurricanes, says Esther Choo, an emergency physician at Oregon Health and Science University. The COVID‑19 pandemic is not a discrete disaster. It is a 50-state catastrophe that will likely continue at least until a vaccine is ready.

Native Americans were similarly vulnerable. A third of the people in the Navajo Nation can’t easily wash their hands, because they’ve been embroiled in long-running negotiations over the rights to the water on their own lands. Those with water must contend with runoff from uranium mines. Most live in cramped multigenerational homes, far from the few hospitals that service a 17-million-acre reservation. As of mid-May, the Navajo Nation had higher rates of COVID‑19 infections than any U.S. state.

Americans often misperceive historical inequities as personal failures

the largely unregulated, social-media-based communications infrastructure of the 21st century almost ensures that misinformation will proliferate fast. “In every outbreak throughout the existence of social media, from Zika to Ebola, conspiratorial communities immediately spread their content about how it’s all caused by some government or pharmaceutical company or Bill Gates,”

Rumors coursed through online platforms that are designed to keep users engaged, even if that means feeding them content that is polarizing or untrue. In a national crisis, when people need to act in concert, this is calamitous. “The social internet as a system is broken,” DiResta told me, and its faults are readily abused.

Like pandemics, infodemics quickly become uncontrollable unless caught early.

In 2016, when DiResta spoke with a CDC team about the threat of misinformation, “their response was: ‘ That’s interesting, but that’s just stuff that happens on the internet.’ ”

The WHO, the CDC, and the U.S. surgeon general urged people not to wear masks, hoping to preserve the limited stocks for health-care workers. These messages were offered without nuance or acknowledgement of uncertainty, so when they were reversed—the virus is worse than the flu; wear masks—the changes seemed like befuddling flip-flops.

Drawn to novelty, journalists gave oxygen to fringe anti-lockdown protests while most Americans quietly stayed home. They wrote up every incremental scientific claim, even those that hadn’t been verified or peer-reviewed.

By tying career advancement to the publishing of papers, academia already creates incentives for scientists to do attention-grabbing but irreproducible work. The pandemic strengthened those incentives by prompting a rush of panicked research and promising ambitious scientists global attention.

In March, a small and severely flawed French study suggested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID‑19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. The hydroxychloroquine story was muddied even further by a study published in a top medical journal, The Lancet, that claimed the drug was not effective and was potentially harmful. The paper relied on suspect data from a small analytics company called Surgisphere, and was retracted in June.**

Science famously self-corrects. But during the pandemic, the same urgent pace that has produced valuable knowledge at record speed has also sent sloppy claims around the world before anyone could even raise a skeptical eyebrow.

No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a “natural ability” at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, “I don’t take any responsibility at all.”

Trump is a comorbidity of the COVID‑19 pandemic. He isn’t solely responsible for America’s fiasco, but he is central to it. A pandemic demands the coordinated efforts of dozens of agencies. “In the best circumstances, it’s hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly,” Ron Klain said. “It moves if the president stands on a table and says, ‘Move quickly.’ But it really doesn’t move if he’s sitting at his desk saying it’s not a big deal.”

everyday Americans did more than the White House. By voluntarily agreeing to months of social distancing, they bought the country time, at substantial cost to their financial and mental well-being. Their sacrifice came with an implicit social contract—that the government would use the valuable time to mobilize an extraordinary, energetic effort to suppress the virus, as did the likes of Germany and Singapore. But the government did not, to the bafflement of health experts. “There are instances in history where humanity has really moved mountains to defeat infectious diseases,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “It’s appalling that we in the U.S. have not summoned that energy around COVID‑19.”

People suffered all the debilitating effects of a lockdown with few of the benefits. Most states felt compelled to reopen without accruing enough tests or contact tracers. In April and May, the nation was stuck on a terrible plateau, averaging 20,000 to 30,000 new cases every day. In June, the plateau again became an upward slope, soaring to record-breaking heights.

It is no coincidence that other powerful nations that elected populist leaders—Brazil, Russia, India, and the United Kingdom—also fumbled their response to COVID‑19. “When you have people elected based on undermining trust in the government, what happens when trust is what you need the most?”

the United States underperformed across the board, and its errors compounded. The dearth of tests allowed unconfirmed cases to create still more cases, which flooded the hospitals, which ran out of masks, which are necessary to limit the virus’s spread. Twitter amplified Trump’s misleading messages, which raised fear and anxiety among people, which led them to spend more time scouring for information on Twitter.

The virus was never beaten in the spring, but many people, including Trump, pretended that it was. Every state reopened to varying degrees, and many subsequently saw record numbers of cases. After Arizona’s cases started climbing sharply at the end of May, Cara Christ, the director of the state’s health-services department, said, “We are not going to be able to stop the spread. And so we can’t stop living as well.” The virus may beg to differ.

The long wait for a vaccine will likely culminate in a predictable way: Many Americans will refuse to get it, and among those who want it, the most vulnerable will be last in line.

It is almost unheard-of for a public-health measure to go from zero to majority acceptance in less than half a year. But pandemics are rare situations when “people are desperate for guidelines and rules,” says Zoë McLaren, a health-policy professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. The closest analogy is pregnancy, she says, which is “a time when women’s lives are changing, and they can absorb a ton of information. A pandemic is similar: People are actually paying attention, and learning.”

As the economy nose-dived, the health-care system ailed, and the government fumbled, belief in American exceptionalism declined. “Times of big social disruption call into question things we thought were normal and standard,” Redbird told me. “If our institutions fail us here, in what ways are they failing elsewhere?” And whom are they failing the most?

It is hard to stare directly at the biggest problems of our age. Pandemics, climate change, the sixth extinction of wildlife, food and water shortages—their scope is planetary, and their stakes are overwhelming. We have no choice, though, but to grapple with them. It is now abundantly clear what happens when global disasters collide with historical negligence.

America would be wise to help reverse the ruination of the natural world, a process that continues to shunt animal diseases into human bodies. It should strive to prevent sickness instead of profiting from it. It should build a health-care system that prizes resilience over brittle efficiency, and an information system that favors light over heat. It should rebuild its international alliances, its social safety net, and its trust in empiricism. It should address the health inequities that flow from its history. Not least, it should elect leaders with sound judgment, high character, and respect for science, logic, and reason.

in 2007 he founded Mosaic, which provides mentoring programs for young Muslims across the U.K. He also became patron of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, where he gave his most famous speech, “Islam and the West” in 1993

If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilization owed to the Islamic world

“Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost. At the heart of Islam is its preservation of an integral view of the Universe.”

he also argues that the West needs Islam in the here and now. There does not seem to be a parallel in any other Western political figure.

the world will also get used to a Western head of state who sees Islam in quite a different light than the waves of populism across Europe and North America

Politics have helped turn the issue into a matter of national pride in Rome. Populists rail against what they call a senseless system cooked up by bloodless, tasteless technocrats. Matteo Salvini of the far-right Lega party dismisses Nutri-Score as fit only for joyless acolytes of alcohol-free wine, fake meat and edible insects. Others discern a menace to Italian agriculture, designed to benefit multinationals. Mario Draghi, Italy’s prime minister and formerly chief of Europe’s central bank, is a technocrat himself. Yet to hold his fractious coalition together, he has had to make disparaging comments about Nutri-Score, too.

The food-grading endeavour is painted as a ploy to undermine ancestral farming products: it is far easier to change the recipe for Coco Pops (whose formula was recently tweaked to achieve a B) than salami (a flat E).

Italy has a child obesity problem, and the Mediterranean diet it defends originally included rather more fruit and vegetables than makers of cured ham would like to admit. “Even if foods are ancestral, it does not mean they are good for you,”

Italy has developed an alternative labelling scheme so confusing that it seems aimed at making a food’s healthiness utterly unknowable.

Italians are slim despite all that pecorino and gelato because they know these treats should be enjoyed in moderation. Professor Hercberg and others say much the same thing: everything is fine, if you adjust the quantities.

both in Britain and in the rest of Europe politics is increasingly structured by a divide between “winners” and “losers” of globalisation and this has led to issues of cultural and national identity becoming more salient politically.

between the general elections of 2015 and 2017 Labour and SNP voters, on the one hand, and Conservative voters, on the other, became more polarised with respect to one another along the cultural dimension (see the diagrams above). However, this was almost entirely due to a shift amongst Conservative voters towards the “closed” pole of this dimension and (in Scotland) a similar shift by the SNP towards the “open” pole

The Brexit referendum was most likely the catalyst for a strategic re-positioning by the Conservative Party. By championing a “red, white and blue” Brexit and by dismissing “citizens of the world” as “citizens of nowhere”, Theresa May moved the Tories towards the “closed” end of the political spectrum, occupying much of the territory that UKIP had occupied in 2017. The appeal was partly successful insofar as the Tories tended to gain votes in constituencies in which the Leave vote exceeded 63%, even if they lost the votes of “open” Remainers who had voted for the party in 2015. Labour meanwhile sought to reframe the debate away from “open”/”closed” issues such as Brexit, giving centre stage to economic issues, framing the struggle as one between “the many” and “the few”. Even though they had limited success in this respect, they managed to win over many young, well-educated, middle class Remainers at the “open” end of the spectrum.

the SNP successfully “framed” the issue of independence as one about freedom from London-imposed economic austerity and inequality. If Labour could similarly frame Brexit as “project about neoliberal deregulation… Thatcherism on steroids”, as David Lammy suggests, it may be possible to reconcile the two competing Labour narratives, but it would require the kind of deft leadership that the SNP showed during and after the independence referendum

For the Tories the task of holding together is likely to be even more complicated as the gap between “open” pro-European Tories and the hardline Eurosceptics of the European Reform Group seems unbridgeable